I'm glad a couple of others have mentioned the fact that you can't pre-mine a coin which doesn't have any mining, and the fact that Ripple itself (although not the internal currency XRP) actual pre-dates Bitcoin.
But I also have to say its definitely not a strong buy at the moment because there is big selling going on from Jed McCaleb and his giant founders share, which is going to make it difficult for the price to go up a lot any time soon.
Long term I'm very bullish on Ripple, but not short term. Next year at least I'd say.
I heard that argument before and I think he dumped some already.
But Jed would be a complete idiot to dump it all now, once things really start to materialize.
And if so, I'm sure there will be enough buyers now, glad to pick up his coins for the actual rate or less.
So still - VERY STRONG BUY!
People have been tracking his selling. Half of the Ripple community seems to have turned into amateur detectives, tracking down Jed's various wallets and monitoring his selling. He is not crashing the price - but he is eating up all the demand for XRP right now and can keep going for quite some time at the current rate. Of course that doesn't mean he won't adjust his prices if demand increases though, so it is still possible that the price could rise; it just depends how much he needs quick cash for his new super secret Bitcoin project (probably called stellar ?http://gostellar.com?).
Some estimates suggests it may be > 1 year before Jed has sold everything, if that is indeed what he plans to do.
